Commencement Speech

by a contributor

Elizabeth Word Gutting

The men go to the grill with the meat. Felicity goes to the living room.

The living room gives off a warm golden glow: one lamp on, the
bookshelves full. All across the city there are voices on patios. All
across the city people speak of earlier in the day, they speak of later
in the week, they speak of earlier in their lives.

In this house they don’t speak of their childhoods: hers one of
abuse, his one of neglect. Neither of them speak to their parents, and
now her mother is dead. Three weeks ago, a Saturday in July, she
collapsed on the Mexican tile floor of her kitchen.

Your mother’s had a heart attack, a strange man from the hospital told her on the phone.

Felicity could not stop thinking: That’s so weird that your heart can attack you. But she said, OK. Thank you. OK.

She said it several times, over and over.

Silverware clangs as Felicity’s husband removes metal tongs from a
drawer. He whistles. She waits by the bookcase because the kitchen is a
galley. She waits by the bookcase because she wants to be in the galley
kitchen alone.

Her mother died alone. A neighbor found her. The Arizona Republic
had gathered at her door for several days; the neighbor was concerned –
that wasn’t like her. She didn’t go anywhere. He knocked, and knocked,
and knocked. Finally he called the police and they broke the door down.

Though she’d told her not to, her mother had come to her college to
see her walk across the stage and clasp the diploma she’d earned with no
help from her mother. Her mother commented later that the commencement
speech got under her skin. You get under my skin. She had said that. To her mother.

As a child though she loved her mother and when her mother’s brother
came to live with them she loved her mother all the more. The house was
full of Fleetwood Mac and banana-nut waffles for dinner. Then one sunny
afternoon in her mother’s study Felicity’s love snapped shut like a
book. It happened in a movement. Her mother put her hands over her ears
as Felicity cried and tried to explain what had happened when her
mother’s brother came to her room the night before. Silenced.

From the living room, Felicity can hear one of the other wives on the
patio speaking of her sister’s new child, her husband’s new job, the
song she’s fallen in love with that plays on the radio thirty-six
goddamned times a day.

She had thought having friends for dinner would lift her spirits. No.
It’s not so. She longs for the soft weight of the summer quilt pulled
up to her shoulders, the hum of the AC, the darkness of the bedroom. Or
she wishes the voices would silence and she could meditate against the
Thai cushion her husband brought from Bangkok. If she could do that, sit
quietly with her breath, then she would speak to her mother.

You are the saddest woman to have lived that I can think of –

She would not say that.

She wishes the voice of her mother would silence her now, because she
is starting to cry and she would very much like to hear her mother’s
voice, though it’s been over ten years since they spoke even a word. She
would tell her that she was sorry, but it is her mother that she wants
to be sorry. Still. She would tell her that she was sorry.

.

Elizabeth Word Gutting lives in Washington, D.C. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, The Quotable, Connotation Press,
and an anthology of D.C. women writers published by Paycock Press. She
teaches creative writing workshops for kids and teens at Writopia Lab.